Dudley Leavitt (minister)

Rev. Dudley Leavitt (1720–1762) was a Congregational minister born in New Hampshire, educated at Harvard College, who led a splinter group from the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, during a wave of religious ferment nearly a decade before the Great Awakening. Following Leavitt's death at age 42, his congregation elected to christen itself 'The Church of Which the Rev. Dudley Leavitt was late Pastor' after the charismatic preacher. Leavitt Street in Salem is named for the early minister.

Leavitt was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1720 to a family with Puritan roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Leavitt's parents were Moses Leavitt Jr. of Exeter and his wife Sarah (née Leavitt) Leavitt. Educated at Harvard College, where he graduated at age 19 in 1739, Dudley Leavitt was first ordained pastor of Exeter's church in 1743, where he served for two years. On October 23, 1745, he was ordained second minister of a splinter church of First Church in Salem. (The congregation had followed Rev. Samuel Fisk from the church a decade prior to Leavitt's arrival, and although informally known as the Third Church, the congregation continued to insist on calling itself the First Church.)

On September 21, 1751, the young minister married Mary Pickering of Salem, born at Salem's Pickering House, the daughter of Deacon Timothy Pickering and sister of Revolutionary War patriot Timothy Pickering. Three years after his marriage Dudley Leavitt's uncle Moses Leavitt died at Stratham, New Hampshire, and named the novice preacher in his will. A year later, in 1749, Leavitt's brother Stephen died at Exeter, leaving Dudley most of his Stratham lands.

Rev. Leavitt was caught up in the wave of religious ferment which swept New England, taking the helm of the splinter group founded by Rev. Fisk, later known as the Third Church of Salem. "Our predecessors who built the former house", recounts the church history, "were thus compelled by a power, equal to that of the bayonet, to leave the place which they greatly loved, and to which they deeply, if not justly, felt that they had all the rights of a majority to retain." Leavitt was part of the New Light evangelical movement that swept New England. Within the esteemed First Church, the movement by the evangelicals had shaken the Church to its foundations and prompted the exodus of the congregation Leavitt later led.

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